Last summer I made a thoughtless and silly error in relation to a model of human population history when asked by a reader the question: “which population is most distantly related to Africans?” I contended that all non-African populations are equally distant. This is obviously wrong on the face of it if you look at any genetic distance measures. West Eurasians, even those without recent Sub-Saharan African admixture (e.g., North Europeans) are closer than East Eurasians, who are often closer than Oceanians and Amerindians. One explanation I offered is that these latter groups were subject to greater genetic drift through a series of population bottlenecks. In this framework the number of generations until the last common ancestor with Sub-Saharan Africans for all groups outside of Africa should be about the same, but due to evolutionary factors such as more extreme genetic drift or different selective pressures some non-African groups had diverged more from Africans than others in terms of their genetic state. In other words, the most genetically divergent groups in relation to Africans did not diverge any earlier, but simply diverged more …